Something cool about Perl 6 every day

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Day 5 – Why Perl syntax does what you want

Opening the fifth door of our advent calendar, we don’t find a recipe of how to do something cool with Perl 6 – rather an explanation of how some of the intuitiveness of the language works.

As an example, consider these two lines of code:

say 6 / 3;
say 'Price: 15 Euro' ~~ /\d+/;

They print out 2 and 15, respectively. For a Perl programmer this is not surprising. But look closer: the forward slash / serves two very different purposes, the numerical division in the first line, and delimits a regex in the second line.

How can Perl know when a / means what? It certainly doesn’t look at the text after the slash to decide, because a regex can look just like normal code.

The answer is that Perl keeps track of what it expects. Most important are two things it expects: terms and operators.

A term can be literal like 23 or "a string". After parser finds such a literal, there can either be the end of a statement (indicated by a semicolon), or an operator like +, * or /. After an operator, the parser expects a term again.

And that’s already the answer: When the parser expects a term, a slash is recognized as the start of a regex. When it expects an operator, it counts as a numerical division operator.

This has far reaching consequences. Subroutines can be called without parenthesis, and after a subroutine name an argument list is expected, which starts with a term. On the other hand type names are followed by operators, so at parse time all type names must be known.

On the upside, many characters can be reused for two different syntaxes in a very convenient way.